Former 2:24 marathoner, now in my late 40s and hoping to maximally flatten the curve of my slide into senescence and mediocrity • Magazine writer, book editor and author, and commentator on the sport of distance running since 1999 • Adviser and confidant of other perambulators • Paradoxical hater of exercise fanatics • Chihuahua whisperer • Sentence-fragment impresario

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Wherein a familiar rascal brags about panning a book she never read

This showed up on Twitter yesterday.

If you've read this blog anytime in the past eight months or so or follow me on Facebook, you know exactly who Kimberly Duclos, the source of this tweet, is and what she's about.
First, I'm just a little skeptical of any book reviews written by people who haven't actually read a word of the books they are panning and have bizarre and unfounded grudges against their authors (see below). I certainly can't approve of the use of "there's" preceding a plural noun by any reviewer worth her salt, as "there is coaches" makes little sense. Based on these two things alone, I give this book review an overall score of 0.02 out of 500 stars.

This is what the perpetrator had to say about the target of this review -- which was deleted not long after it appeared, although by whom I don't know -- about a year and a half ago.

Kimberly Duclos's version of the story is that she met with Hudson Elite and decided it wasn't for her because Brad, who has a marathon best of 2:13, was overweight and didn't do any running himself. (This is on top of claiming to have met with the Hansons-Brooks people and "taking me back," both of which are also bullshit. She's never met with Kevin or Keith, and she came crawling back to me in 2013 begging for a second chance after I had spent 2 1/2 years not even thinking about her.) She was so disgusted, in fact, that she decided to take her nonexistent interval training to a nonexistent ancillary C.U. track. Brad didn't even know her name until today, although he and many of his athletes are well aware that there is a freakish and nettlesome former runner holed up somewhere in the city launching attack after demented attack at me, Lize, him and the whole Hudson Elite program from the sanctity of a computer. (At one point, Kim's blog included some garbage about how ludicrous it was that Hudson Elite has a board of directors and actual structure, but she's deleted it.)

For Kim to give a book she's never read a shitty review is obviously bad enough. For her to do this because she doesn't like one of the authors for absolutely no reason at all is significantly worse. For her to then openly brag about it is completely, breathtakingly messed up, as this not only reveals that she's an abominable person who wants to be known for evil chicanery, but also marks her as a fool who acts at cross purposes to her own ugly agenda by owning up to something any halfway-rational dirtbag would try to keep secret. (She deleted the tweet sometime today, either because the review itself was gone or because she experienced a rare jolt of conscience and soundness of judgment.) Hell, maybe she'll even start putting her own name on her own beyond-WTF Letsrun posts about me, Brad, and Lize. And maybe I will run under 4:00 for the mile at altitude this summer.

What is especially telling, and admittedly entertaining, about her doing this now is that on the same day Kim submitted this sham review (i.e., yesterday), she posted something on her blog for the first time in months. As you can see -- at least until she deletes or messes with the content -- it's largely about rising above bullying, acting like an adult, and taking the high road. That makes sense, especially when in the same post you take shots at your former Central Mass Striders club-mates and call your former coach a scam artist who took advantage of you. My taking advantage of Kim, as I have noted in years past, consisted of being paid twice in eighteen months (granted, I knew she was indigent and incapable of managing gainful employment when I took her on, at least the second time), giving her guidance that led to significant lifetime PRs, and listening to her ramble on grievously about things that I didn't care to hear about, lots of stuff of a sexual nature that I would be loath to reveal publicly but very likely will if she somehow manages to piss me off even more. (So far I've ignored the Letsrun tantrum she threw on November 4 of last year, which was a several-hours-long free seminar on abnormal psychology.) That's one hell of a mellow "scam," ain't it?

As one of my friends observed about her, "Wow. WTF. Does she not realize that it's pretty hard to lie about most shit nowadays...she makes up ridiculous shit over and over again. Who does she think she's fooling?" That is a very good question, because she's not fooling anyone I know. I don't think she could even fool other people who don't like me very much, provided that they actually know me.
I would love to say that I'm rooting furiously for Kimberly Duclos's comeback to be successful, because her being happier would, in theory, remove her focus from me and others she's been bashing for years and allow her to place it whee it belongs. But I know better, because when I was coaching her and she was enjoying life as much as she ever had, she was still underhanded, shady and plain mean. Her mental problems and substance already exacerbate the meanness within her that has nothing to do with anyone else or a page in the DSM. Some people are just nasty, and she is one of them. I like to think that with the right medication and therapy she could at least orient herself to the world as it is and not as the dystopia she sees it as, but it seems unlikely.

Oh, and a housekeeping note: Until now, out of a combination of laziness and a vague. latent desire not to punish Kim any more than necessary, I had never linked my pages about her to the index page of my website -- I'd linked to them from Facebook and from here but not from within the kemibe.com domain itself. That has changed, and I've done some restructuring of the pages about her so that her various bursts of malfeasance are arranged in chronological order.